Help me get the word out!

Do you want to give mother nature a really great Christmas present this year?  Do you love Wyoming's wild places?  Do you wish that you could make some sort of contribution to offset that inherent damage that your energy consumption does to the environment in the extraction of fuels? Are you apathetic about the environment but love me? Well boy oh boy do I have an opportunity for you!  Here's the deal: The little non-profit that I work for in Wyoming is trying to get a grant this winter from the EnviroKids program by Nature's Path Foods and we need your help!  Because we are such a small organization working in a not very populous state we start out with a handicap right out of the gate, we just don't have influence over the same number of people that a non-profit in say NYC or San Francisco has.  Last years winner won with something like 27,000 votes and we operate in a city that barely has that many people in it.  BCA fights for the responsible management of public lands in Wyoming, but the pocket gophers, wolves, elk, deer, and sage grouse can't vote, they don't have facebook accounts.  YOU do.

We could be the underdog story of the year!  I have no facts to back this up, it is merely conjecture, but I'm pretty sure a non-national, Wyoming based non-profit has never won a FB voting based grant on any sort of a large scale.  I can't confirm nor deny this, but no matter how many different ways I google "Wyoming non-profit wins grant through facebook voting" I still come up with nothing.  Help us change that, BCA does a lot of good work, with only a few great employees, and a severely limited budget because we can't imagine not doing it; this is our passion and our life's work, help us keep it up!  

MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS WHOLE POST BELOW:

How to Vote:

1. Go here.

2. If it doesn't come up automatically, find the project titled: Protecting Wyoming's Wildlife from the Oil Industry by Erik Molvar

3. Click "Vote Now"

4. Do it again every 24 hours until Dec 15th at midnight

"P-p-p-p-please help BCA help us!" -Pronghorns

Yet Another Call to Action...

"For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?"  ~Aldo Leopold

I know that I have always been conscious of the quiet, but steady destruction of wild places that human consumption necessitates, somewhere in the back of my head there has always been an awareness that natural places that I have known and loved in my life will not always be there.  Its a reality I have been uncomfortable with for a long time, but one that I know I thought, and I think most people think, that they can do nothing about.  How does one person stop the inevitable grind of progress in defense of the wild places they have come to love?  This is an adversary against which the average person cannot possibly compete, right?  But in my more recent work I am beginning to discover the ways in which each of us, in our own way, can make a difference.  I am finding them, and I want to share them, because this is a fight that is truly worth fighting, not just for the environmentalists and the outdoors enthusiasts, but for everyone and let me tell you why.  

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast called "Too Much Information" with Benjamen Walker called "4 Big Ideas From Sept 17th, 2012" and I highly recommend it to everyone, and I mean everyone, not just environmentalists, even though I know that my audience of the 4 people who read this blog is heavily biased on the environmental side, please share this, because this matters.  It's about the book Small is Beautiful by the British economist and author E. F. Schumacher and it talks about economics of scale.  My favorite quote from the episode is by the author Andrew Sims, who says: 

"If a business goes bankrupt you can set up elsewhere, if the biosphere, if the ecosystems upon which we depend are bankrupted through over-exploitation, well, there might be no coming back from that."

I love it because I think it completely explains the sense of urgency I feel about protecting the planet that we depend on, not just because I am a nature-loving tree-hugger, but because I can see that in a very fundamental way this planet sustains us, and if we don't take care to preserve at least some of it, eventually we will bankrupt it.  Consider this statistic:  According to the Pew Environment Group 6000 acres of open land are lost each day...each day!  That is 2.19 million acres of land that are lost each year, every year or alternatively 250 acres per hour...until somebody says that's enough.  I'm saying that's enough now.  We cannot live as though our resources are infinite, we cannot assume that growth is always the answer.  Try to imagine a world with no open spaces, no wild lands, no wilderness.  It should be unimaginable, because it is illogical and unnatural, but I've met people who say they would prefer it.  I think this is a preference borne of a lack of understanding.  

So what can you do to help change this?  

Educate, teach your children about the environment and wildernesses that you love, your parents, your friends.  Talk about it, tell people why you care.  I can't help but be passionate about these things, and it just bubbles out of me all the time.  Ask any one of my friends, I am one of the most annoying hiking buddies ever, because I just spout information about ecosystems, air quality, endangered species, habitat loss, and anything else that pops into my head.  I can't help it, but I like to think that every once in a while I inspire someone else to care, and that is the best outcome that I can think of.  

Support, not everyone wants to do the kind of work that I do, and that is absolutely fine.  Not everyone has to, but if you support the efforts that people in my line of work are making, show it.  I know so many people who agree with what I do, and congratulate my efforts to protect these wild lands, but getting people to lift a pen and share these feelings with others is like pulling teeth!  Writing a letter to the editor, blog post, facebook post, or tweet about a local wilderness area that you love can be so inspiring to someone like me who spends their days making efforts that most people never even notice.  Like the Campaign for America's Wilderness on facebook, find the person closest to your area who is out there inventorying public lands to find eligible wilderness areas and shake their hand, write them a thank you letter, or donate to their organization.  Write to your congress person urging them to give lands near you wilderness protection.  These things can take 5 minutes, but if you don't show anyone that these issues matter to you, no one will ever do anything about it.  

Warning: Shameless plug of my own work to follow...

If you are in Wyoming, have traveled to Wyoming, or want to travel to Wyoming, consider doing me the favor of writing something about your appreciation of the lands that I have inventoried.  If you hunt in Wyoming, consider voicing how crucial winter ranges for big game need better protections so that there will continue to be healthy populations of game for sport hunting.  If you appreciate desert landscapes, consider writing to the to a local paper and expressing how important it is that we realize deserts are not simply wasted space, sitting on top of possible energy reserves, but are instead valuable habitats and ecosystems.  If you like backpacking and back country camping, write to your favorite magazine or publication urging readers to recognize that many of the areas they enjoy are not yet protected, and could in fact be developed at any time.  

Do something!  Do anything.  Express what you care about in your state and why to anyone that you can, because tomorrow's 6000 acres could be the forests and fields of your childhood, and if you stay quiet today you'll forever regret it when that fateful tomorrow comes.  

"The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."  -E. F. Schumacher

Wilderness

I have been on hiatus for....oh since about the day that I got to Wyoming and moved into a truck in the Red Desert.  My truck-inhabiting days are coming to a swift close though, thanks entirely to the Wyoming winter that dropped 8 inches of snow on us over the last 2 days.  So now I feel it is time to share some stories of my wilderness inventorying and of what this has all come to mean to me.  First, a bit about what I really do, because I have come to find out that many of you have no idea, and that is okay!  I am quite happy to educate you all!  Below is an excerpt from an article about my work that I wrote for the winter newsletter sent to members by the non-profit I work for, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, to read the whole thing please consider joining BCA and supporting the great work that we do!

"Even those who are conservation minded don’t always have a strong grasp of what a wilderness inventory is, and why they are important.  So what do I really do?  I map routes, roads, and human influences in otherwise predominantly un-human influenced areas.  Why does this matter?  Because if I can prove that these areas possess “wilderness characteristics” such as outstanding opportunities for solitude and primitive recreation, than I can potentially be a catalyst in their lasting protection, and what more can I give to the generations to come than the joy of a wild place preserved?"

So this is what I do in a nutshell, but what I really seem to do is take a lot of photos of roads and change a lot of flat tires.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my job, it is perfect for me, I love the challenges and the beauty, and the fact that I have the real potential to bring about lasting change for at least 5 small corners of the beautiful Wyoming Wilderness.  And I am really good at changing tires.  Here's the wonderful part, I think when you are doing good work, good things come to you, and although I have had 3 flat tires in the course of this summer, at least 2 of them happened at just the right time.  By this I mean that when I am in the desert I rarely have cell phone service, and I tend to stay out for between 4 and 8 days at a time, i.e. longer than the accuracy of the weather forecast that I checked before I left.  Rain in the desert means slippery and dangerous roads and no chance of getting any work done, not to mention a greatly increased chance of getting stuck. The second to last flat tire that I got forced me to leave the desert 4 days earlier than planned, but just in time to miss 3 straight days of rain.  The last flat tire was this Sunday night, in the dark I might add, and it sent me into town 6 days early and just in time to find out that 3 cold fronts were headed right for me; dropping not only temperatures, but also several inches of snow.  So I appreciate my flat tires, for all the trouble that they have caused, I suspect that they have saved me from quite a bit more.

Plus I love the challenge, changing a truck tire is no easy task, and I've had some doozies, tires so flat that I can't fit a jack under them, in darkness, and rain, and cacti were often involved.  Every time I finally get through changing a tire I feel like a rock star; yeah, I just did that, all by myself, and I could do it again if I wanted to.  I love that, almost as much as I love the feeling of completing an inventory, now that is a victory.  By the time I am done with an inventory, I know every route, road, fence, and structure on a property; all the folds of the topography, and all of the property bounds.  I can navigate like a pro, I can hit any little 2 track road, no matter how small, and know exactly where I am, I can point to every hill I hiked and every arbitrary property line that I surveyed.  I love that, I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with the completion of something like that; yeah I memorized those 12,000 acres, and now I'm going to go do it again with 10,000 more, no big deal.

It's not all fun and flat tires though, the advocacy side of things (what I'm getting into now, since my field work is wrapping up) is a challenge of another sort.  The term wilderness means different things to different people, and many tend to visualize pristine mountain streams and dense forests when wilderness is brought to mind.  That's great, because those are wildernesses and also deserve protection; but a desert is too, although many have trouble recognizing this as wild land and not waste land.  The definition of wilderness that I follow comes from the Bureau of Land Management, because they are the ones who will make the call as to whether the land that I wish to protect qualifies for wilderness protection, but folks who have no experience in wilderness designation and its official definition tend to have a definition more like this one in their heads:

wil·der·ness  (wldr-ns)
n.
1. An unsettled, uncultivated region left in its natural condition, especially:
a. A large wild tract of land covered with dense vegetation or forests.
b. An extensive area, such as a desert or ocean, that is barren or empty; a waste.
c. A piece of land set aside to grow wild.
2. Something characterized by bewildering vastness, perilousness, or unchecked profusion: the wilderness of the city; the wilderness of counterespionage; a wilderness of voices.

I resent this definition, especially part 1.b., which describes wilderness in deserts as "barren," "empty," and "a waste."  These are the attitudes that I face in my efforts to encourage others to protect these areas, a sentiment that there really isn't much there worth protecting.  It's not their fault, usually they have never been, have no idea what is or is not there, and some of them don't even know that Wyoming even has a Red Desert, at least not beyond the run down gas station at the Red Desert exit on interstate 80.

There is a lot more to this area than what can be seen from the I-80 corridor, acres and acres of beautiful buttes and sage brush country, wild horses and pronghorn herds, startlingly beautiful sunrises and sunsets, million upon millions of stars in the night sky.  These beautiful natural treasures are slowly being encroached upon by various energy and mineral extraction developments in such volume that it will take decades for the land to recover, if ever.  Below is a picture of the Jonah Field, the poster child of inefficient and destructive energy developments, from The Daily Climate.  This is the kind of development that I wish to prevent.  Don't get me wrong, I am not "against" the energy industry or fuel extractions as a practice, I am a realist and I know how heavily we depend on them in every facet of our lives.  The goal of my work is not to stand in the way of energy development (wilderness designation is one of the few designations that protects land from energy and extraction based leasing) but I am hoping to encourage innovations in smarter growth and development.  In short, I know I'm not going to stop the interested companies from getting at the fuels in the earth underneath my proposed wilderness areas, but at least I can ensure that in order to get at it they have to be smart about it and not destroy the land above it.

So this is my life these days, each day a wonderful adventure trying to protect the Wyoming wilderness.  Obviously I am enjoying it, but I am also saddened by it too, the mere fact that I need to fight the fight that I am fighting means that despite how far we have come as a society, in general people still forget that without this beautiful planet we would be nothing.  Nature has created a perfect, balanced system all on its own that we are slowly taking apart, one piece at a time; the least I can do is to try to be the proverbial barefoot hippie girl, trying to hold my ground against the bulldozer of development.

"The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." 

-Aldo Leopold